About TOTPS

“Thoughts on the Passing Scene” is a Washington D.C.-based blog that focuses on a variety of topics from defense and diplomacy to economics and culture, and a bit of everything else. Except fashion. The blog is an idea under construction. The number and frequency of posts will vary as I find a rhythm conducive with my free time and the speed at which the world ruffles my feathers. Some posts will be longer with more original thinking and writing, others simply links to articles and photographs I find thought provoking or amusing.

The name is borrowed from the economist Thomas Sowell’s occasional column entitled “Random Thoughts,” which always begins, “Random thoughts on the passing scene.”

The photo on the header was inspired by a passage from Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22.

But the fall of fascism in Lisbon in April 1974 was the occasion for an almost perfect storm of radical desires… The best revolutionary poster I saw — perhaps the best I have ever seen — expressed this same thought in a rather less erotic way: it showed a modest Portuguese family in traditional dress, being introduced to a receiving line of new friends who included Socrates, Einstein, Beethoven, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. (There are many people in much richer countries who are still putting off this rendezvous.)